Irrelevant or off-topic: Vista and Facebook are very relevant to this community
Baiting others: maybe he's guilty of this, but I think it's more the jarring cognitive dissonance of him opposing the accepted wisdom. A minority opinion isn't necessarily baiting.
Disrupt normal discussion: other people post his stuff.
Let's face it, he writes well, he argues his points well, and he calls out people he thinks are wrong. pg does the exact same thing, but no one disagrees with him since we're all in his world here.
Besides, how much of a troll is it to say something is good?
If that's not baiting I don't know what is. In actual fact a lot of articles about Apple these days are bashing them. Especially for the Macbook air.
Also, I'm not really sure why Vista is relevent TBH, are people here starting up a company to write desktop apps for Vista? Do any hackers use Vista?
After the instinctive reaction subsides I'm still left with the sense that some of his wording is calculated to arouse knee-jerk comment/traffic. That intention is at the heart of the troll mentality. Which is a pity, because he really doesn't need to do this.
I think that is is especially impossible to be a "troll" when someone else is posting entries from your own blog to a social news service. No, I don't think that qualifies.
It's possible. Instead of a comment trolling on a site, a blog is trolling on the Internet (or blogosphere, if you like that word).
"Vista is not good."
...to me, that's a pretty worthless comment--a grammatically, orthographically, socially correct version of "Vista Blow turdz". But it's no better in terms of elucidation.
Let's put that theory to the test:
"The notion that posting [spam/outright lies/defamation/deliberately inacurrate and misleading information/gratuitous hate speech] onto your own web property is somehow illegitimate, to me, seems like an unhealthy notion."
If most Americans defend spam/outright lies/defamation/deliberately inacurrate and misleading information/gratuitous hate speech in a misguided attempt to protect free speech while simultaneously waiving all their rights whenever Bush utters the word "terrorists" then I pity them.
Doing exactly what you just scorned me for is definitely bad style.
And you'll have to prove Canada imprisons people for "speech violations" a lot while the US doesn't.
It's called "minimalism."
Anything on my blog is, by definition, neither irrelevant nor off-topic, since the theme is "things that are interesting to me".
But they're on a website whose URL is my real name. It should be pretty clear that I write for myself and people like me. I am of the opinion that much of the tech media is held in thrall by Steve Jobs and is abandoning their job of fair and balanced reporting because they want to have early access to new iPhones and iPods. (In fairness, I blame Jobs as much for having that policy as I do for them abiding by it.) So I write about it.
If that's irritating to you, don't read. But don't accuse me of trolling for simply expressing Matt Maroon's opinions on mattmaroon.com. That's very small-minded, and egocentric. No offense, but I don't care enough to spend my time irritating you.
However, I'd say if you want them to be taken seriously sticking to the facts is a better tactic rather than accusing everyone else of being biased.
There's nothing wrong with submitting your own stuff. To make the front page, people still have to vote it up.
It's stable, and a lot of people like it. It's not Microsoft's finest moment by any means.
Do you really think that the press is not overly favorable toward Apple due to Steve Jobs's long history of giving priority access to people who consistently write good reviews for their products? Even a lot of Apple fans agree with me that fanboys are numerous and annoying, and that their ethic is sneaking into the media.
And quite a few people take me seriously it seems. I get a pretty large number of pageviews for a private blog, and tens of upvotes when most are posted here.
Anyway... I think I'll sit the next round of this out. O/S wars are so over.
But I don't think that about any operating systems. I don't know what percentage of OS licenses come with hardware, but it has to be pretty mammoth.
And I don't think it's clear at all that the public doesn't want it.
"An Internet troll, or simply troll in Internet slang, is someone who posts controversial and usually irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum or chat room, with the intention of baiting other users into an emotional response or to generally disrupt normal on-topic discussion."
I think quite a few of his blog posts fall into this category.